“If we had those links we wouldn’t need to travel as often to Birmingham and we wouldn’t be polluting the environment by travelling.

“Hyper-fast fibre network is an infrastructure of the future and that we should look at it as such. We need to focus on it, as seriously as we focus on more traditional infrastructures like roads, rail, airports etc, and proportionally allocate funds to where we believe we will get the best returns.

“Hyper-fast fibre networks will certainly yield returns in the coming years and decades, and bring benefits to all participants in the society, be it consumers, businesses, government or administration.

“The current and projected investment from the government is just a drop in the bucket, and while it will certainly help, it will not make much of difference in the overall availability of hyper-fast fibre based services.”

The current subsidies for broadband come to £45/household at most, but the typical cost of fibre-to-the-premises is £1000 and £1500 per household.

Commercial operators will only target the cheaper areas with dense populations and apartments, which Ivanovic says could leave a third of the UK without superfast broadband.

Rural broadband slow-lane

Ivanovic warns that the most remote areas will be unlikely to get superfast fibre broadband connections, even if government funding increases significantly.

“My personal opinion is that the last 5 to 10 per cent of homes are always going to be expensive to deploy fibre to directly, and I believe that those areas will most likely and best be covered by a combination of satellite or fixed wireless technology,” he added.

“Those are unlikely to provide speeds of 100Mbps or 1Gbps, but will still provide sufficient speeds for most applications.”